EcoLocalizer

Editor’s Note: This topic was also covered on Gas 2.0: Hawaii to Get Electric Car Battery-Sharing Program

Perhaps nothing has been perceived as a greater weakness for electric vehicles than charge times — spending 6 hours recharging every hundred or two miles is enough to readily ruin the idea of taking a cross-country trip.

To work around this, some groups such as Project Better Place propose to standardize battery packs and pack-replacing infrastructure. On one hand, it seems an easy solution to the problem; yet battery technology is an ever-moving target, as anyone who has witnessed the dramatic shrinking of cell phone and laptop batteries in the past decade can attest. But, as the stereotypes go, batteries can’t really take a charge as fast as you’d need, and you couldn’t deliver it that fast if you wanted to.

Or could you?
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Westport, Connecticut, recently joined a small but growing number of communities to ban the use of free plastic shopping bags within its borders. The new ordinance, which goes into effect early next year, would impose a $150 fine on any store that offers such bags.

WestportNow.com reports that citizens attending the Representative Town Meeting (RTM) vote on the ban overwhelmingly supported the measure. The RTM eventually voted 26 to 5 (with one abstention) in favor of the ordinance, and also rejected a proposal that would have made the ban effective only through Sept. 19 of next year.

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Roz Savage is the first to admit she’s not trying to “save the planet.” Despite all the abuses we heap upon it, Earth will be “just fine in several million years,” she says.

We humans, on the other hand, are making it increasingly likely that we’ll “drown in our own filth,” Savage warns. And to draw attention to just how bad we’ve let things get for this Big Blue Marble we call home, she recently rowed — that’s right, rowed — solo from San Francisco to Honolulu.

The 99-day, 2,324-mile trip started near midnight on May 25 and concluded with a pre-dawn arrival on Sept. 1 at the Waikiki Yacht Club.

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It’s one thing to be appalled by the monstrous accumulation of millions of square miles of plastic waste spinning slowly in the North Pacific gyre. It’s another thing entirely to build an ocean-going vessel out of plastic waste and set out across the sea to call attention to the environmental catastrophe.

That’s exactly what two men, one from California and one from Hawaii, are now doing. The two — Marcus Eriksen, a Ph.D., Gulf War vet and director of research and education for the Long Beach-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, and Joel Paschal, a former businessman in Hawaii and a one-time employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — are sailing across the Pacific in a homemade vessel, Kon Tiki-style, to “raise awareness about plastic fouling our oceans.”

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Oregon: the land of volcanoes, beautiful coastline, forests…and trash? Unfortunately, that might be the case if Hawaii gets its way.

According to the Portland Tribune, Honolulu is quickly running out of space in their main landfill. In order to prevent overflow, the city has hatched a plan to send ships full of garbage up the Columbia River in Oregon, where trash will be put on trucks and trains headed to the Columbia Ridge Landfill.

It may seem strange that Hawaii wants to send its trash to a state known for being so environmentally conscious. Interestingly enough, that’s exactly why they want to do it. Read the rest of this entry »

Why have gas prices risen to nearly $4 a gallon (or more) in the U.S.? Is it oil speculation? Rising demand? Or the first signs of peak oil?

Whatever the cause (and there’s good reason to blame all three to some degree), most so-called experts these days aren’t expecting oil prices to drop anytime soon. In fact, Newsweek this week features a sobering article titled, “The Coming Energy Wars,” that predicts we’ll soon see oil prices top $200 a barrel. When that happens, the authors warn, we can expect everything about our daily lives to change.

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